Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker? TheDaily? Reddit, yesterday.
First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure, and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains on stale links that's a shade away from being as if they were spun up by a Russian spam squad. Save yourself, redo the logo, redo the color scheme, don't let legacy drag you down.
Second thing is do some soul searching, figuring out what layer Digg wants to play in. Links aggregation? Community building and content creation? Traffic? Attention? Engagement? That elusive ad sharing model for content creators?
After that figure out for who. Reddit's core is dying, and eventually it'll be fully crowded out by the mainstreaming of rage comics, aww pics, and counter-Tumblr-pseudo-nerdy programming. Do you target those people, the walking wounded much like Slashdot?
Or do you go after the youths, the ones addicted to Instagrams, 9gag, imgur, but bored of their Facebook feeds? Then play the waiting game. New is everything old, after all.
The game's so different now from 2005. All the majors have feeds now. All the majors have figured out sharing, commenting, and extracting action on a story item. On top of that you're competing against mobile guys like Flipboard.
This is one of those situations where execution is easier than creating an idea. What is Digg's $1MM idea? Good luck with that because Digg needs to be futuristic but also really lucky twice being at the right place, the right time, with the right idea. Once you're lucky, twice you're good, right?
I bet this kind of flame out, this one thing keeps Mark Zuckerberg from sleeping.
The replies you'll get are "you make your own reddit, just remove the popular subreddits!" but you're right. reddit is usable for hardcore users that want to invest real time into their experience, it's atrocious for casual users (that don't care for the meme spam). There is a large hole that (new) Digg could fill.
I agree, but I think that Reddit is only usable for a specific subset of hardcore users.
Unfortunately, Reddit's admins chose to take a hands-off approach to policing bad behavior in the community. As a result, Reddit regulars have to guard themselves against providing enough information in their comments to attract the attention of a diligent troll.
I had a 5-year-old account on Reddit, and had been active on there from just about the beginning. I had hand-picked subreddits and the like. But, ultimately, it was better just to delete my account entirely and become a casual reader.
Now Reddit is basically the daily equivalent of reading the comics section in the newspaper.
I think Digg has a huge opportunity here. I doubt that they will take advantage of it though.
I had a 5-year-old account on Reddit, and had been active on there from just about the beginning. I had hand-picked subreddits and the like. But, ultimately, it was better just to delete my account entirely and become a casual reader.
Wow, could you fill us in on exactly what happened?
I doesn't matter that Reddit itself is only usable as a news source for hardcore users, if news stories show up there first and then are shared to a wider audience.
That's precisely why it is the source of stories: there is a myriad of communities with the wildest varying interests, and that's where things grow before going mainstream.
I'm not sure that 'hardcore' is the right requirement for Reddit usability. It takes all of 5 minutes for a new user to register an account, then customize their subreddit subscriptions.
That said, it's the default front page that provides new users with their first Reddit experience, and sets the tone for their overall impression of the site, and when they've got r/pics, r/WTF, r/politics, and r/atheism on the default frontpage, I don't really understand what kind of userbase they're trying to build; everything on the default frontpage is either vapid image-memes or vitriolic flamewars.
What else could the defaults be, though? The good communities are smaller and better moderated, but they don't have the resources to police anyone who signs up for an account. As it is they get the users who bother to change their subscriptions from the default, and that's an useful filter.
Nudging the participants in some of the big communities into better commenting behaviour seems achievable (less users go vote in comment threads, most communities manage being self-policing), but driving out the meme generators isn't achievable from votes only. They are what the lowest-common denominator of the user base wants to see, and what they upvote.
On the other hand some of the smaller communities would benefit from more recruitment, particularly of dedicated users, but that doesn't have to come from the frontpage. Tapping into other social networks, via things like twitter sharing and per-subreddit twitter accounts (like StackExchange does), would be a good avenue for that.
I think you're missing how efficient Reddit is at turning casual users into hardcore users. I can't put my finger on how its done but Reddit is excellent at sucking people in and getting them to come back and come back until they've become hardcore users.
I've been on Reddit for four years, and I don't think that it's usable for even hardcore users. The people attracted by the front page invariably find their way to the subreddits too. And the overall mood of the place encourages even the best users to be goofy.
There are still good submissions in very small and highly technical subreddits, but those get very few posts.
I visit reddit because I'm honest-to-god addicted, but at some point my self respect is going to win out.
If no one liked reddit, no one would be there. The majority of current users came from digg. You can watch the decline in content and maturity since then (and before then as digg was shedding users before they flipped the switch on diggv4). The content APPEALS to them which is why reddit keeps gaining users.
The "real" or "hardcore" users, aka the ones that have been there since when the content was good and relevant, are smart enough to find subreddits that appeal to them because they like the style and functionality of reddit.
I will agree that digg could go back to its tech roots and gain back some of that crowd. I myself have found tech related news on digg that was not posted to reddit, at all.
That's true, if nobody liked reddit nobody would be there. That does not mean that reddit isn't missing out of millions more users that are driven away from the site because they don't enjoy the "popular" content but don't understand how they can customise their own reddit, or they don't want to work to get reddit to be a site that they like.
> The "real" or "hardcore" users, aka the ones that have been there since when the content was good and relevant, are smart enough to find subreddits that appeal to them because they like the style and functionality of reddit.
I actually think Reddit is quite optimized and not missing out on too many users. The Reddit homepage can take on the following states:
1) As it currently is dominated by memes and linkbait articles
2) Links to actual news and good content
3) A combination of 1 and 2
Out of the 3, my guess is #1 drives the most traffic. If you're goal is to get the most traffic, then almost by definition you're trying to get popular content as the default state.
Really? The people that were there in the beginning to see subreddits develop... aren't smart enough to "search for subreddits" and find ones that are interesting? Or aren't involved enough to find those subreddits organically?
Maybe it's a bad assumption, but I guess I don't give a shit. This whole "we have to cater to the lowest denominator is the whole thing we're trying to avoid, is it not? Digg was fine when they went after geeks. As they tried to make it social and opened it for massive appeal it went down the shitter. I have no problem with the more refined subreddits staying hidden. If people can't manage to find their way there, they probably shouldn't be there.
I don't think the point is whether we care or not. The claim was that Reddit powers the news cycles and gets them before Gawker, HuffPo and all the other sites.
I'm not sure it's really driving news cycles, but I have vaguely noticed reblogging, even from high-profile bloggers (e.g. at mainstream newspaper/magazine websites) being keyed off stuff that gets big at Reddit, if not first, then at least before they blog it. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are monitoring relevant subreddits for reblogging ideas.
You'll see something get a few hundred comments on Reddit, often in one of the non-default subreddits, then the next day there's an article on an Atlantic or NYTimes or HuffPo blog about it. It'd be interesting to trace who influenced whom, since I don't have hard numbers, and am not 100% sure where Reddit fits into the food chain. I'm certain there's some food chain though, because some of it is very unlikely to be coincidence; e.g. I'll read some interesting "weird historical episode" tidbit someone pulled out of Google Books one day, then a day later a mainstream news organization is blogging about this very same weird-news tidbit from 1913, which they clearly borrowed from somewhere (whether Reddit, Twitter, some kind of analytics data, etc., I'm not sure).
Okay, Eternalwar ended up on the front page, ended up on news outlets all over and even got a response from Sid Meier. From a reddit post.
Then there was the girls graduation present where her dad got all her teachers from kindergarden to graduation to give her encouraging words. This hit my local newspaper about 5 days after I saw it on Reddit.
Soft news has basically turned into trawling reddit and twitter for popular things.
You're conflating two things. Reddit doesn't often break news, Twitter does that more in real time with its immediacy and reach.
Just like Hacker News is/was to TechCrunch, Reddit generates a news cycle, as in right now across the world there are cadres of journalists and bloggers using Reddit to source and/or get ideas on what to write and feed into the long tail.
Any kind of community can become very addictive, especially to people that are going through a lonely period with a lot of free time.
I know of somebody that's deeply engrossed with Skyscraper City even though she isn't an architect, just because it has an encouraging community and she has a 4 hour commute and works in multiple cities (which makes it very hard to get into an offline community)
It kills me to see the reddit-hate here cloud obvious facts. There are a number of things that reddit has gotten good worldwide publicity for or has had a hand in shaping. That's not true for a large number of sites. In terms of what reddit is, it is important.
My Reddit frontpage has plenty of news stories, but those are the subreddits I happen to subscribe to. I'm sure the news agencies aren't subscribed to the "Advice Animals" subreddit.
I have a really healthy RES filter list that makes reddit better for me.
I browse /r/all all the time with this filter on and get good content. Reddit is hell without it. I wish though that I could ban rage comics all together.
Another thing that would make reddit better would be to allow karma growth on self posts. If you id, there would be less imagifying of text for posting to IMGUR so the karma counts.
Some times though, it helps to filter out imgur.com completely and you get a nice view...
That doesn't seem like his point. I think he is pointing out that digg changed too much and changed too much of the UX and people got fed up and moved to the next best thing.
I don't think he's saying Zuckerberg is worried about reddit, he's saying Zuckerberg is worried about being a fad or a blip. And he should be. More than one metric is indicating that Facebook usage per-user is diminishing, or at least peaking.
Very good analysis there. I wonder whether # of eyeballs is more important that accurate ranking algorithms. Viewers are washed, rinsed and asked to repeat.
The OP is fine. You're being overly pedantic. People have been using the word this way for (literally) hundreds of years.
Moreover, the truly literal definition of the word is from the Latin for "letter" and means something like "letter-for-letter truth." So using this word to describe anything other than a written document is "wrong" on some level. But language doesn't really work that way.
First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure, and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains on stale links that's a shade away from being as if they were spun up by a Russian spam squad. Save yourself, redo the logo, redo the color scheme, don't let legacy drag you down.
Second thing is do some soul searching, figuring out what layer Digg wants to play in. Links aggregation? Community building and content creation? Traffic? Attention? Engagement? That elusive ad sharing model for content creators?
After that figure out for who. Reddit's core is dying, and eventually it'll be fully crowded out by the mainstreaming of rage comics, aww pics, and counter-Tumblr-pseudo-nerdy programming. Do you target those people, the walking wounded much like Slashdot?
Or do you go after the youths, the ones addicted to Instagrams, 9gag, imgur, but bored of their Facebook feeds? Then play the waiting game. New is everything old, after all.
The game's so different now from 2005. All the majors have feeds now. All the majors have figured out sharing, commenting, and extracting action on a story item. On top of that you're competing against mobile guys like Flipboard.
This is one of those situations where execution is easier than creating an idea. What is Digg's $1MM idea? Good luck with that because Digg needs to be futuristic but also really lucky twice being at the right place, the right time, with the right idea. Once you're lucky, twice you're good, right?
I bet this kind of flame out, this one thing keeps Mark Zuckerberg from sleeping.